


younger than we've ever been

by Figure_of_Dismay



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M, Fleet brat baggage, Post-Endgame, Pre-Canon, canon-concurrent, different symptoms of the same disease, justin tighe baggage, no Threshold mention, no infidelity, owen paris baggage, rampant Elizabeth an Dudley subtext
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 08:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19808098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/Figure_of_Dismay
Summary: "It was Kathryn who came to find him, not the other way around. He thought later that this came as something of a surprise to both of them. Then again, she’d come to find him once before, and look what that had brought him. So much more than he had imagined, at that point in his life, was possible, and yet also. Also. Also it brought him the reasons why he lived then alone, in an apartment meant for a solitary person, and did not reasonably expect for that to change. That’s what Kathryn Janeway was in his life, apparently, or so it seemed when she fetched up again at his door, the unrefusable edge of an event horizon, leaving everything altered in her wake."A non-linear love story. Or a character exploration of a relationship. One of those, or both.





	younger than we've ever been

**Author's Note:**

> a work in progress, but there's also three times this much more already written and waiting to be typed up. In first draft form I'm probably 3/4 of the way through what I want to say with this work. 
> 
> I fell hard for this pairing, thanks to Missparker's wonderful fics, especially the Extended Stay series. But I also know that the believability of their relationship can be tough to negotiate from a storytelling standpoint. I got stuck on "I know they would work, if they could just get there from here," for quite a while. But then I started working on this to prove to myself that I could help them "get there" -- or find "there" again, anyway. 
> 
> I think I convinced myself. I hope I can convince you too.

"Fields within fields  
Acres to the edge  
An acre for your bed  
Thinking of you  
Marking up your plans  
Making up what memories you have  
Look around there’s no one left but us

Steady, steady, steady the wheel  
I know we’re heading for the ditch  
But I think we will be  
Ok, ok, steady me now  
My wooden hands grind into dust  
That settle like snow on us  
Younger than we’ve ever been"

Kathryn Calder, Younger Than We've Ever Been, Bright And Vivid

**

It was Kathryn who came to find him, not the other way around. He thought later that this came as something of a surprise to both of them. Then again, she’d come to find him once before, and look what that had brought him. So much more than he had imagined, at that point in his life, was possible, and yet also. Also. Also it brought him the reasons why he lived then alone, in an apartment meant for a solitary person, and did not reasonably expect for that to change. That’s what Kathryn Janeway was in his life, apparently, or so it seemed when she fetched up again at his door, the unrefusable edge of an event horizon, leaving everything altered in her wake.

It had been 2 years, not quite but almost, since he’d seen her last -- a party at his father’s in that time when he’d honestly thought that bridges might be rebuilt, only a handful of weeks after the return, the debrief, the release back into an active but shaken and unfamiliar post-war Alpha Quadrant, when everything had felt new and raw and possible. He’d been a married man with a wife and a baby daughter and a rank reinstatement to show his father, and Starfleet had even made the rank official. It had seemed, at the time, like reentry wouldn’t be the catastrophic shift that Tom had expected it to be. He’d even, foolishly, had hope that it was the first step up of many into a new, more full and successful life. It hadn’t worked out that way, not for long. 

He had lost track of most of the Voyager crew shortly after that last cycle of triumphant celebrations. Some by chance, each quickly swallowed up by the machinery of the Fleet in the AQ, and lead in different directions. Some because Tom was so involved in trying to convert his shaky new life into something sustainable that he had purposefully or with subconscious intent, avoided the distracting or disrupting influences they presented. As much as he was reluctant to admit it, Kathryn Janeway had been one of the latter. Then again, he’d had the feeling that she was avoiding him in return. 

The Kathryn Janeway who presented herself at his door that evening, in the gold and pewter cast of fading Northern sun, was a disquieting sight. Firstly because it had been long enough since they had walked out of each other’s lives that it had seemed that the pattern of things naturally prevented them meeting again outside of the extreme formalities and solemn occasions. But mainly it was because the woman at his door was much changed from the one he’d last seen glowing with relief and success. Her hair was longer than it had been, though nowhere near as long as he’d ever seen it, but it was loose and windswept around her shoulders, not neat and contained -- a sight he still associated with sickbay or times of extreme strain. She must have walked from the transport depot, and indeed she looked a little flushed from the sun and the brisk breeze, but underneath that she was pale and too thin, thinner even than that second year in the Delta Quadrant when she’d run herself so ragged that he and the Doc and Kes had had regular discussions in quiet tones of worry in sickbay. She managed to strike a pose before him that was both defiant and vulnerable. Goddamn the Janeway stagecraft, he thought, but of course the reason it always worked on him was because she was helplessly sincere, even when she meant to manipulate. 

“Captain-- Admiral,” he said, grasping for his brains with both hands through an incoherent but overwhelming wave of emotions. “What brings you to Helsinki?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, Mr. Paris, I came to see you,” she said and at least her warm familiar drawl was as confident as ever, “Harry told me where to find you.”

Oh, Harry, the thought with no small exasperation, always the need to please. Tom had been keeping quiet about where he had ended up and what he was doing. He wasn’t fit company for visitors lately and maybe, he’d been afraid to see who didn’t come calling. Seeing her there though, right in front of him, he didn’t find that he was upset to see her, far from it. He opened the door wider and gestured her though.

“Come in, Admiral. Sorry about the mess, can’t say I was expecting company.” 

She slipped by him with another furtive, assessing glance at his face. He watched her pause at the end of the entranceway and take in the view of where he’d been living and perhaps rethink a few things. It wasn’t so much a mess as mostly in boxes, and the boxes dominated the general decor. The couch was clear of as-yet-unpacked ephemera but it was covered with a bunched up quilt and squashed pillows because he’d been sleeping there instead of the large, empty, new bed in the other room. He cleared his throat and darted forward to clear the couch and move the old mugs from the coffee table and clear a few obstructive boxes from handy surfaces, adding them to a stack in a spare corner of what ought to have been his breakfast nook. When he met her gaze again, Janeway was watching him with heavy sympathy but not, he thought, pity or judgement -- which was in a way harder to take. Pity or anger could have annoyed him to a good, healthy righteousness to raise his chin but understanding was a bit more prickly in the air. 

She’d taken off her loose flax colored overcoat and draped it over the back of a nearby chair, revealing a loose, collared white blouse in a drapey matte fabric and neat dark slacks, both hanging on her like they were a size too big. She saw him noticing and she drew herself up, defensive again, but even with the late sunlight coming in through the blinds he could see that there was a brittle quality to her, overstretched and tired like someone recovering from a long illness or a recent bereavement. What the hell have you been doing to yourself, Kate? he thought, but he knew better than to come out and ask in direct confrontation. If he did she would deflect, and possibly take the first excuse to leave that she could find. Tom didn’t want her to leave, not now that she was here and certainly not if he was going to be left in the dark and worrying, 

“Harry said you’d taken the job here a few months ago,” she said, indicating the milieu.

“I did, but I wanted to be sure it was a good fit. And sorting out the stuff took a while. Division of property, you know, it’s not any easier than you think it’s going to be.” Tom smiled tiredly and shrugged. He wasn’t going to shy away from the facts of what had become of his new Alpha Quadrant life, but he didn’t want to wallow in self pity either. “When I bought this place, I sent for the boxes, but I’ve been too busy so far to do much besides live around them.”

Janeway nodded slowly, like she knew what he meant. “You remember I’d been living with Mark, before,” she offered, there being, of course, no need to specify before what. “I couldn’t believe how much there was to deal with when he got my things out of storage. Frankly, I just moved it into storage of my own.”

“That was one of the few good things about replicator rationing, it stopped you from collecting junk just because. Well, stopped most people. I somehow ended up with a closet full of junk anyway, by the time we got back.”

“That was because you frequently somehow ended up with more rations than strictly intended by the system.” this was not a rebuke, she was smiling with real amusement. Strangely, for such a dyed in the wool fleet brat, she’d always been entertained, even proud of the ways he’d found of bending the rules, to make life a little more interesting. Except, of course for that one time she very much hadn’t been -- but then neither of them had been having very much fun by then, and he hadn’t meant that for interest.

“Just lucky that way, I guess, ma’am,” he said, grinning. He had already gotten over being embarrassed by the fact that he hadn’t shaved since the start of the weekend and was living out of boxes, and was wholly, almost absurdly glad that she was there.

“Oh, Tom, Maybe I started us off on the wrong foot, but cut out the ma’ams, alright? I don’t think either of us has any use for ranks just now. I know you know perfectly well how to use my name.”

“I do, but I thought we didn’t talk about that anymore,” he said gently, in surprise. The overwhelming lightness brought on by her presence there in the room with him, Kathryn Janeway putting aside her secret mission — the one they all vaguely knew had consumed her if not what it was — to come visit him in his sad bachelorhood had made him maybe dangerously incautious, referencing the past, for once, made him sweetly nostalgic, even on some deep and unreasoning level hopeful, rather than frustrated and abashed. The sting and sense of constraint it had had for years was startlingly missing. 

Tom watched carefully but her expression didn’t shift with rebuke. Instead, she met his gaze with a steady intensity and something that was not quite curiosity and not quite resolve. his heart rose further in his chest with idiotic hope, even as he asked himself with real concern if he still wanted this. Especially now, especially knowing that if she had come to him for this, for just this, that she might very well mean it as a special exemption from the status quo, temporary, soon spent and put aside once more. Or maybe, he cautioned himself, his imagination was running away with him about the light in her eyes.

“Things have changed since then, several times over,” she said seriously, taking a step towards him and then another. His heart rattled precipitously in response. “I think it’s about time we let some of those old rules go, don’t you?”

Her back was to the wall of windows so she was framed by lines of raked gold sunlight and bars of ivory shade. It occurred to him how seldom he’d seen her in daylight in those last few Voyager years. Not that it was properly daylight now, he thought, not that it was properly anything. It was dinner time, he thought wildly, casting about for reasonableness even as he stepped towards her closer still, he ought to offer to feed her like a civilized man. Offer her a seat and a drink, a cup of coffee, decent small talk and cautious invitation. 

He didn’t. He recognized the searching look in her eyes, the little longing, doubting frown that made him, despite everything, think of a coltish young woman who didn’t quite know what to do with herself or what effect she had. What a profound effect. She looked exhausted, yes, and worryingly skinny and she was older, yes, theoretically, but it had hardly been that long, not really, not for either of them, and she was still absolutely the same woman. Of course he could still know and read her, of course he could see that she was looking for— that she wanted— Well he wanted, too, although almost just as much he wanted to wrap her up, take her fragile little querulousness and take her somewhere safe, but he still knew too that that sort of kid glove treatment was unwelcome, or she wouldn’t have turned up at his door at all, she would have turned up on Chakotay’s doorstep instead, Seven or no Seven.

“Kate,” he said, low, slow and intimate, “Why did you come here today?”

“Well, you know, I had the best intentions,” she said. There were girlish nerves in her voice, such as had shocked him the first time he’d heard them. she was someone who didn’t seem rattleable under most circumstances, but he’d learned that she often doubted her own charms. More than that, she always seemed to get caught up on whether she believed that what she wanted was what she should have.

“I heard from Harry that you’d settled here, and that it seemed like you needed some cheering up, and I have a lot of leave to fill up lately, so I wanted to come by. Maybe take you out for a housewarming dinner, catch up. But now that I’m here and I actually see you, I think I… maybe I…”

Her rushed and chagrined words petered out as he slid his arms around her. He moved slow. Giving her plenty of time to step back, to say, on second thought, we really shouldn’t, but, at the same time, to tantalize. Sliding his hands over her sides, around her little waist, careful and steady and telegraphing intent, longing. Tom could feel the warmth, almost even the smoothness of her skin though the gauzy silk of her blouse. He could feel her go softer in his arms, relax. 

Then she reached for him in return.

“Housewarming, is it?” Tom said, teasing and vague, hardly paying attention to his words. She wore a different perfume than before, but her skin smelled the same. He nuzzled into her and spoke in her ear. “I think it was, you came for is some of that old Paris charm.”

“Don’t gloat,” she said, firm and sly, giving him a slight shove, very light, mainly planting her hands against his chest. “I’m breaking a six year vow here and I’m not entirely sure why, so you don’t want me changing my mind.”

“Don’t change your mind,” he said without thinking. His voice sounded anxious and needy in a way that hadn’t in years. He held on tighter — she felt so slight in his arms, thin muscle and bone, and little in her flat shoes, he curved around her protectively — but he didn’t rush her with a kiss because he wanted to coax not push. He wanted for her to choose, and choose him.

She did. She said, “Okay,” and reached up for him herself, which he flattered himself was the deep down reason why she’d shown up at his door. He wondered how long she had waited after hearing that things were really, truly over with B’Elanna this time before she came. But he didn’t think about it for long because he was thoroughly distracted. He backed her up against his new and newly cleared dining table and brought her right up close. 

“If I was a real gentleman I would take you in my arms and carry you off to bed,” he mumbled against her skin.

“This works for me, for now,” she assured him, which appeared to be very much true, to his extraordinary and inarticulate delight. 

Later, she said, “I missed you. Oh my god, I missed you,” but she said it so softly that he wasn’t sure he was supposed to hear, or at least if he was supposed to respond.

When her blouse was off, Tom could see that there were recently regenerated places on her skin, on her arm, her side, not obvious, but he knew to recognize them thanks to too much time on sickbay duty. With a growing sense of worry and retroactive dread he hesitated, and then lifted her hair to peer at the side of her neck in the light. Kathryn sent him a warning look but she held still and let him, and his suspicions were confirmed. 

“Kate, what the hell have you been doing to yourself?” He’d asked it aloud this time, voice thin with alarm. 

With B’Elanna he hadn’t asked after the first hesitant attempts, no matter what signs he’d seen he’d seen of injury and self-destruction. He’d known it was cowardice, but also known that the only way to get B’Elanna to talk about it was to argue it out of her, and by the time it had started, he’d learned that the arguing didn’t help in the long run. He’d also known that B’Elanna’s fear and rage and self-destruction were so far over his head, so far away from him, that while he was stricken with compassion for her, he wasn’t equipped to wade into it. For some reason, though, Kathryn Janeway’s brand of self sacrificial fervor had never intimidated him. It terrified him, sometimes, because it had led to a series of situations where the only way out seemed to be through loss. But he’d never felt the same dread with her that acknowledging it would, in far too short a time, drown them both. 

She met his stare, face flushed, eyes somehow both haunted and stern. “I think you guessed,” she said darkly, “The got me out in time, as you can see. More than that I can’t tell you.”

“What kind of can’t?” He as stroking the pink, new place on her ribs with his fingertips and it made her shiver, but she didn’t seem to mind, so he didn’t make himself stop.

“The kind you think, not the kind you’re afraid of. Which means that there’s no point in badgering me for details.”

“I don’t badger, I never have,” he protested with false modesty, somewhat truthfully, and then seriously, “It was serious though. It had to be if they sent you to… Are we in danger? Are Miral and... are they in danger out there where they are?”

“Not anymore.”

“So, whatever it was, it’s over, you’re done? You won’t be doing any more of what you can’t tell me about but got you almost-- any of that again” He watched her closely for hedging or evasion, but there was none, and she nodded. 

“It’s over,” said Kate, “All over and done. I’m home now.”

“Okay,” he said, believing her, and riding out a staggering surge of relief. “Sorry for wrecking the mood. I’m just glad you’re alright. I’m not going to lie, I want to ask, but I won’t.”

“I’d hoped you wouldn’t notice,” she admitted, “But I guess that was foolish. You always could see right through me.” She smiled, wistful and rueful and familiar. She reached up to cup his cheek in her small, warm hand.

“You’re here, that’s what matters,” he said, trying to reassure both of them. He did want to ask, to badger, to know and to understand why she thought it was worth the risk, but at the same time his mind shied away. He didn’t want to picture it. He’d thought they, and she had left all of the worst the galaxy had to offer behind out there, but apparently he’d been wrong, and learning so hurt.

He leaned into her touch, not ashamed to realize how much he’d missed it, even through those long, full years where he’d been sure that he’d moved on. Then he leaned in farther, reclaiming her mouth. It turned out the mood wasn’t wrecked after all. If anything the atmosphere felt even more electric, with what could have been lost and hadn’t been prickling at the back of his neck, making him grasp hard and cling.

After a long and galvanic interlude of reacquaintance on his new and newly cleared table, they paused long enough for Tom to lead her to his bed. Kate paused in the doorway, a slight hesitation he felt in the hand that held his. The two of them looked at the large, pristine bed, smooth sky blue sheets, a plain ink blue comforter smoothed across its expanse, a pair of old-fashioned fluffy pillows propped against a low, polished cognac brown wood headboard. Not a starfleet bed, and also not a lived in bed.

“I bought it new for the apartment,” Tom said quietly, promising, this is ours, you have no competition here, “I bought everything new.”

Kathryn let him peel away her remaining clothes with breath-caught reverence and spread her out on the soft, rustling down and crisp cotton. He knew six years had gone by since the last time they’d done this, but it was no less instinctive, no less overwhelming for all that time apart. He worried briefly over the sharpness of Kate’s hipbones under his mouth, the ease with which he could find her ribs with his fingertips, but she was leanly muscled, too — she’d been driving herself hard to regain her strength after whatever it was that had happened, he could tell. More than that, Kate’s clear blue gaze, the gravity of her attention on his skin, the deftness and wanting and care in her small, firm hands was intoxicating, as it had always been. 

Even moreso because for so long he’d figured that this part of their relationship was done, wrapped up tight and put away, and then left in the depths of space where it couldn’t haunt them. And because recently he’d stared bleakly out at his new life where the last hopes of his marriage had died and something in him had retreated, expecting only to continue in a solitary way, finding purpose in raising his daughter and in his work, and risking nothing that might do further damage to his heart, his fragile equilibrium, only finally beginning to settle in B’Elanna’s wake. 

He had loved two women utterly, although neither had truly welcomed expression of the vastness of his feelings, and those loves had filled him up with more than he felt able to contain, and it still hadn’t been enough to make a life on, for either of the two or him. He had decided, with the lucent clarity of the ebb tide of life altering grief, that he would not survive a third love or a third loss like those he’d had, so therefore he was done. Done with all of that. He had thought he would make a small nest of small pleasures and small, productive pursuits somewhere and live in it. He had picked a place, a lonely city with a promising job as far away from San Francisco as he could find on earth and still indulge his need to live by the sea. He had made a start. 

And now here was Kate, absurdly lovely and fine and warm, lively and firm under his hands. Her demanding voice, her knowing smile, her pleading eyes, all still the exact things that could take him to pieces, make him feverish with craving her, lay him low with indulgence. 

Kate never seemed to be a person driven by various physical pleasures or craving them. She had a way of refusing to admit desire within the sphere of her reality in the normal course of events, only in extremity, and then only sometimes — and yet she was a deeply passionate woman. She was thoughtlessly sensual and responsive. She always seemed so astonished, so startled and swept away by what she could feel, what she could want. Impulsive and malleable in the push and pull of desire and demand. 

He found Kate watching him through hot, half-lidded eyes with something like reverence and wonder. It made him frenzied with wanting her, with wanting to delight her. Both of them clutched hard and tussled too long and tried to drag out the sensate madness between them, so long denied. 

Later, Tom lay on his side in the low, butter yellow light of his bedside lamp, watching her as she settled and dozed beside him. He’d pulled up the sheet to shield them from the breath of the cool, climate controlled air, but the comforter was still kicked to the floor. It was full dark, even the slow northern sun was done for the day, and the city beyond his window was inky and dim. 

Before, aboard Voyager, Kate had also often slept after sex, drugged by pleasure and exertion into rest that she didn’t usually allow. Back then he would pretend to sleep beside her, often enough falling into a true sleep, or a heavy doze, because he’d never been fully free to ask to stay with her outright. He’d strained and chafed at the need for subterfuge in order to earn the extra time with her, but he didn’t resent Kate for it — he’d thought he hadn’t, anyway — because she hadn’t been free either. Both of them back then had been ludicrously hobbled by duty. 

He was free now though, and Kate had appeared at his door wholly at her own impulse. He wasn’t going to waste time now by being asleep or hiding behind closed eyelids when he was finally free to absorb her presence at will.

*

When Kathryn woke, she woke wild eyed and startled, though she covered it well. He reached out to sooth her, a light hand on her arm, then sliding gently around her waist. She looked torn for a second and then leaned into his touch.

“Bad dreams?” he asked softly.

“Over with, now that I’m awake,” she said dismissively, smiling but her fingers tightened on his arm.

“In my experience, knowing that doesn’t seem to make the scary ones any easier.”

“Hmm. You still get them?”

“Much less than before. I think my circuitry finally caught up with the idea that we’re not living on the brink of danger anymore. The change of pace might not be fully my choice, but it’s got its good sides,” he said. “Listen, I think we missed dinner back there and I’m starving. Let me make something, alright? I even have some real produce in the icebox.”

Tom used the word ‘real’ for food grown and bought rather than replicated just the way she did. Both of their families had tended to traditionalism, growing up. And then the need to forage and barter and grow food to ease the strain on the replicators on Voyager had only reinforced the idea that there was a strong distinction between the two. 

Tom made something of a production of a late brunch dinner, but Kathryn seemed entertained by his flourishes with chef’s knives and shiny bell peppers and practiced flips with the copper-bottomed skillet. He made omelettes with jarlsberg cheese and sautéed peppers and onions, and a fresh pot of coffee — also real, not replicated now that he could afford not to put up with the never quite fresh tasting replicated kind. 

“You never told me you could cook,” she said, impressed, but also almost an accusation. Probably calculating the number of recognizable breakfasts she might have had if she’d realized that he was better suited to chefery than to sick bay, he guessed fondly.

He shrugged. “You know how Neelix was about that kitchen. Would you have wanted to horn in on his territory? Not to mention, he was already pretty sore at me over Kes for some of those years.”

“Kes,” said Kathryn sadly, “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Yes, Neelix spent a lot of time being jealous over her, didn’t he. Sometimes I feel that I overlooked that too easily, but then of course I didn’t want to get in the middle. Even if they were crew, I wouldn’t have tried to play counselor, and they weren’t exactly, yet. But they worked themselves out, I suppose.”

Tom nodded. He’d considered Neelix a great friend later on in their journey, and had depended on his kindness and late night mess hall council whenever he and B’Elanna were on the outs, but Neelix’s territorial behavior over Kes had disturbed him at the time. Insecurity, probably. At least Neelix had calmed down a great deal when he and Kes had split romantically, but Kes was the one thing he and Neelix hadn’t dared to talk about.

“She was more like a little sister to me after a while, you know that right?” said Tom, considering when the whole Kes and Neelix debacle had coincided.

Kathryn raised her eyebrow at him, looking skeptical. He wasn’t sure if she was skeptical of his assertion or of his implication that she’d ever been jealous.

“Really,” she drawled. 

“Yes, really. Remember when she came back with that story about an alternate future? She told me that in the timeline she’d seen, that Kes and Tom had been married, and instead of feeling… wistful, I just couldn’t picture it at all. That’s when I realized I’d never really had feelings for her that way.”

“I remember that. That timeline she saw worried me in so many different ways. I don’t know what we did to change things, but we were very lucky. Sometimes I look back, and I can’t believe how lucky we were.”

“And anyway,” he said, referring to Kes again, “I don’t think I have to remind you of the timing of all that. No matter what Neelix thought.”

“Right.” She shifted and tried to look innocent but this evening had proved that she couldn’t even pretend to have forgotten. “No, I think I always knew that there wasn’t anything there… But it’s nice to hear for certain, Tom.”

**

She stayed with him. Of course she was always going to, but they put off admitting it until late. Until after a lingering dinner and some time over coffee in the living room.

It turned out that she hadn’t waited long at all after hearing about his divorce. She’d been out of touch with the Voyager compatriots for several months during her assignment -- she wouldn’t admit to a specific timeframe -- and had only heard about the final demise of the Paris-Torres marriage from Harry a few weeks ago. She’d tried to contact him a couple of times in the intirium. Tom admitted he’d been avoiding his backlog of messages for a couple of months. He hadn’t noticed her name on the list, and stung with regret that he’d unintentionally ignored her.

“It worried me,” she admitted, “Maybe because of the way things have been going for me lately, but hearing that you were so far out of contact with all of us… I wanted to see you, just to be sure that you really were alright.”

“Oh, I’m doing okay -- or at least I’m heading that way. It’s weird, I expected to be a lot worse off. Maybe it just hasn’t fully hit me yet, I don’t know. Not that it’s been a day at the park, but,” he shrugged, and smiled tiredly.

“Or maybe you already went through the worst of it. Harry said it sounded like things were-- He said he guessed you’d seen it coming for a while. And at least it’s all settled now, that’s something.”

“Not completely, in some ways. Miral will always tie us together, and I can see that finding compromise there is going to be… something. But it’s true, that door, with B’Elanna is closed. And the truth is, it’s a relief. Maybe, probably overdue.”

“I know this sounds unbelievable coming from me but I really always did hope that you and B’Elanna could make it work. No matter what it looked like to us on the outside, the two of you always seemed to find a way through whatever had flared up. I guess, after a while, it was easy to assume that that’s what the two of you wanted. Chakotay knew that it was more serious this time, though. He thought we should try to help. He was going to talk to B’Elanna, and he wanted me to talk to you… I thought it was like all the other times, and with out history… And then the project started and I had to break contact before I’d really decided if I should interfere. I don’t know, Tom. Would it have helped?”

“No, no, I think it was the right call not to get in between all that. B’Elanna and I were both messed up and angry. Facing up to the fact that there are some things you should stop trying to fix because they’re not good for you. I don’t know what I would have said or done if it turned into the three of us in that fight, but I imagine it would have been ugly.” He sighed, and decided he didn’t even want to picture it. The idea of turning to her for support while it all burned down was a nice one, and he’d had it even at the time, but he’d also known that it was an awful risk and that he’d been in a bad frame of mind. It would have been a waste of what they’d been. “Did Chakotay take it okay when you wouldn’t get involved?”

“Not happily, but it was alright. The usual, disappointed but not surprised. I think he’s used to that from me by now,” she said with a dry little laugh, he didn’t think was bitter. “He doesn’t know the context, but he does know that you and B’Elanna is one of the few places where I won’t meddle.”

“You really never told him about it? Us? I thought… you two were so close for a while there. I really thought you had.”

“No,” she said quietly, “I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone. Not even him. I think he might have wondered, but he never asked. I wasn’t proud of how I treated you, Tom. I didn’t see a choice when we were out there, but I… I didn’t feel like I could talk about it at all, back then.”

“Too fresh,” he agreed, “Too impossible.”

“Yes,” she said, heavy with understanding. “Did you tell B’Elanna?”

“I admit to being tempted. You were hard to get over, you know. Not to mention, the way the way the two of us acted over a couple of those incidents. The, you know,” he gestured vaguely in the general vicinity of his shoulder to indicate the demotion and its circumstances, which they’d made an effort to never mention once the whole episode was resolved. “Baffled B’Elanna to the point of frustration. It would have been handy to give her some context. But I had the sense to realize that it would have been like throwing gasoline on the fire, and if I didn’t want to see the working relationships of basically the entire senior staff go up in flames, I should keep certain things to myself.”

“Yes. Something like that. And the more people we told, the more likely it would have been that Starfleet would have had to take a... concerned interest when we got home. Maybe that was cowardly of me, and I’m especially not proud of that, but I didn’t want them involved.”

“It isn’t their business. It never was. Cowardly or not, I’m still glad that those times belong only to us. For us alone to decide what they meant.” He laughed dryly then, thinking of all the effort spent on not speaking, partitioning off those feelings and memories so they wouldn’t intrude. “I have to say I’m relieved, too. I’d hate to think all that determined secret keeping had been for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” she said softly, and then looked at him, solemn and sweet, and he sensed she was talking about something deeper, “I hope we can say it’s all been worth it. Now anyway, looking back.”

“I think we can, Kate. I think I’ve always believed that.”

*

She hadn’t brought her bag with her when she’d taken the cab to his door. “I booked a hotel,” she said sheepishly, “I left my bag. I really did have the most honest of intentions here, Tom.” 

He grinned in the face of her exasperation, which was put on, and her embarrassment, which wasn’t. The protestations of innocence had always amused him because she spoke so earnestly of what her most chaste, or at least her most uncomplicated self had honestly meant to do, and yet it had also always been her impulses driving them. Her allowance, and the magnetism that had somehow caught and held, in spite of the denial and denial and indulgence and denial again through the years. 

Tom gave her a soft, knit shirt to wear which she put on in place of the re-donned blouse and slacks without a hint of twitchy modesty. He’d given her a cream colored henley because she’d commented that his room felt chilly and the sleeves swallowed her hands even when she rolled them up a couple times. The hem hung down her thighs. It was so easy to forget that Kathryn Janeway was a small, lithe woman because the force of her presence was enough to confound and distract even the most avid of observers, but he remembered with a warm, staggering rush and was back to wanting to wrap her in his arms and not let go.

Tom was slightly self conscious himself as he undressed and got into his night clothes, standing at the bureau and feeling Kate’s eyes on him from where she sat up in bed. He was softer around the waist than he had been back then, when they’d been together before, and his hair was a little thinner. He no longer had a starfleet gym a few decks down to lean on for a regulation fitness level, just a loose schedule of running or swimming when he felt restless, and the labour he put in on in-house builds at work. He was softer all over, in fact, softer at heart, too he thought, and older too. She hadn’t seemed to mind earlier, though, so he tried to tell himself not to worry and hurried through his nightly routine. 

“We never got to do this before,” Kathryn said as he climbed in beside her. Her voice was soft with regret and longing. Tom felt an answering twinge, deep within, the precise lance of comfort denied, and missed, and longed for. He was surprised that he felt something else as well. A nagging frustration that she spoke as though this denial was a thing apart from her, not a symptom of the rigorously compartmentalized life she’d lead on Voyager. As always, he understood why, and yet he’d pretested in a small inner voice that it wasn’t fair, they’d lost so much time, there could have been another way, if only she’d been willing to bend a little -- even though they’d just spoken of how impossible it had been even to speak of, even as a thing gone by.

“No, we didn’t,” he agreed, and focused himself on the present. Despite himself, he felt hopeful. “But it’s a different life now. Maybe we’re finally getting our timing right.”

He slid in beside her in a whooshing rustle of sheet and duvet. They lay shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. Kate’s foot reached out and tapped the side of his calf. He hadn’t slept, earlier, when she had, and he hadn’t slept well the night before -- laying on his couch with the lights dim and the stereo on for company as he tried to read himself to sleep with drag coefficients and net energy consumption calculations late into the night. He was already drowsy. 

“I’m not great at sleep,” Kate warned, as though this might by some trick of improbability or blindness be news to him.

“Try closing your eyes and laying still for a while,” he coaxed, teasing, “And if that doesn’t work, I know some fun ways to wear you out. If I’ve dozed off, feel free to wake me and we’ll give ‘em a try.”

She huffed a laugh and gave his arm a tiny push on the arm for teasing, but he could feel her settle into the mattress beside him. Tom wanted to stay awake again and wait for her, not leave her alone in the sleepless dark, but sleep was already lapping around him, a tide ready to bear him away.

**

Tom woke in quick steps from listless dream, to realizing with his eyes closed that it was still dark, still night and he was still tired. Then he realized that he could hear the soft uneven breath and unheard straining of someone crying and trying not to. Katrhryn, beside him, crying with as little noise as she could manage, wound into a sad tight curve, facing away from him. It hadn’t so much been the noise that woke him, Tom thought, but the tension in her body, or the misery in the air. 

“Kate, what?” he mumbled, incoherent with sleep and worry. He shifted her hair aside, fingers slipping through the thick fall of it in order to touch the curve where her shoulder met her neck. Her skin was hot with the effort of tears. He tried to stroke soothingly with sleep clumsy fingers.

“You have another dream?” he guessed.

She didn’t respond, or move, or breathe for a long, taut moment and then her only response was a faint, inarticulate noise and then a hitch of her breath. Tom couldn’t tell if the sound was an affirmative or a negative or if it was even meant as a response, but his chest squeezed in sympathy. His own eyes stung. He coaxed and pulled until she rolled over into his arms. She was shaking. She said something into his shirt.

“Hmm?” he asked gently, sliding down to hear her better.

“Tighter,” she said, pleaded. 

So he held her tighter, and tighter still, and draped his leg over hers, keeping her half pinned, feeling her fingers digging into his chest and her breath panting fast and hectic against his skin for all the wrong reasons. He spoke soothing nonsense, a susurration of affection and calm, and held on until her breath began to level out and the iron tenseness of her muscles eased to a pliant heaviness in his arms. 

“Are you alright?” he asked hoarsely, voice rough as if he’d been the one running the ordeal. 

She nodded, and then shrugged, and then shifted away slightly to breathe easier. 

“What was I thinking coming here, to try and help you when I was… when I’m in this kind of state. I honestly thought I’d gotten past this… mess. I’m sorry, Tom, you don’t need to deal wit my baggage on top of yours.”

“Don’t be sorry, just tell me what’s going on,” he urged. He was still running his hands soothingly along her back. He was worried, emotional outbursts were not in Kathryn’s usual repertoire, even in moments of weakness or extreme stress. But he was also exasperated by her cryptic half apologies. Even tearstained and clinging she kept her distance, he thought wearily. Well, fair enough, she had a lifetime habit of it behind her after all.

“Well,” she said, halting and wet, “I suppose the easiest place to start is that I’m thinking of resigning my commission.”

*

Tom got the whole story out of her slowly, part by compound part. It turned out that his life wasn’t the only one that had fallen to pieces with a quick and complete implacability in the time since the return. Part of it was that the war they’d missed in the Delta Quadrant had left Starfleet in a state that neither of them recognized. Tom’s tenuous rank and his specializations had kept him out of the thick of it but Kate hadn’t been so lucky. The madness around the Borg issue had quite logically sunk its teeth into her, arguably the greatest living expert besides Picard. The choice had been made clear, get involved in the project -- even now she would divulge no specifics, but he was beginning to realize it was for his protection not hers, and it didn’t really matter anyway -- or she was welcome to a lot of fairly decorative, ceremonial duties as The Voyager Captain in the name of rebuilding their peacetime image and no work of actual substance. In Kathryn’s mind there was no real choice. She’d been hoping to be rewarded with a command at the end of it, it had been all but implied, which had helped weight the scales. There had even been hints, not quite whispered but certainly implied that a refit for Voyager herself might be on the table if the budget of resources allowed for it at the right moment. 

Tom was almost willing to believe that some portion of the Admiralty really did want to see Voyager in space again, all made over and triumphant, as a friendly mascot to cheer the fatigued public. But even if they did intended for Voyager to fly again, he could see that Kathryn would be kept far away. He almost couldn’t believe that she’d ever let herself think they’d let her have it back even before the apparent falling out, but then she’d always seen different things in Starfleet than he had.

“It seemed justified, at first. It was necessary to keep all of us safe. I went. It was a success, the mission goal anyway. I got injured, which you guessed. When I was fresh from recuperation, I was summoned to another meeting. They had another approach in mind, drastic measures. I wanted no part of it. I gave them a piece of my mind and told them that they would be forcing the Borg to retaliate and retaliate quick. I got enough of them to see reason that the committee ground to a halt and the crucial moment passed. I haven’t been reprimanded but I’ve been ordered to take leave. I think they want me deprioritized and out of the spotlight for a while.”

He could tell that she was stung by the implication that the removal to obscurity was a punishment and not a relief to her and also by the implication that her loyalty was in any way doubted by those sought to shuffled her mutely aside. 

“You know my feelings about Starfleet have not always been what you might call warm and fuzzy but even I’m surprised at their behavior. What call have they got for doubting you? If nothing else, they’re forgetting about the Janeway legacy. They have to know you wouldn’t jeopardize that.”

“I think they feel like my judgement has been a little unsteady, by their metrics.”

“It’s not like you chose to get zapped into the Delta Quadrant.”

“No but I chose to stay flung, destroyed the array, and then made a laundry list of easily contested choices on the way home. Some of those were pretty hard to defend, and a few of them hit pretty close to home for you, by the way. One of those I didn’t want to defend at all.”

He made a pained and dismissive noise. “That’s all water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. Probably we should talk about it sometime but let’s not get off topic tonight.”

It wasn’t just starfleet getting to her though. When she got home on her forced leave, she’d found out that Gretchen had had a mild cardiac event, and was home recuperating fine but was going to need more help around the property and better health habits. It was already decided that Phoebe and her family were moving to be close, and neither Phoebe nor Gretchen had considered that Kathryn might be the one to come and be the dutiful daughter.

“She’s getting older. I was gone for seven years and she thought I was dead for four of them, which must have been a strain I can’t even imagine, and now I can’t seem to try to make up for. Phoebe was always closer to her and I do see that it makes sense. I know that my mother and I are both too stubborn to get along all that easily long term, especially while she’s feeling usurped. But they didn’t even ask.”

“Maybe she was embarrassed to ask. She’s a strong, independent person who’s lived alone for at least 15 years and you’re her successful vice-admiral daughter living out your starfleet dreams, at least to her point of view. Do you really think she’d want interrupt your life and admit she needs help at the same time?”

“Hmm.”

And then there was the awkwardness around Seven, now Anika, and Chakotay. Now there was a minefield. 

Anika and Chakotay were getting married. They had both individually contacted her to break the news. Seven-Anika had also divulged that Chakotay wished to be a father and she, on consideration, found that she wished to be a mother. She missed Mizati and Icheb and the twins, she missed the time spend with young Naomi Wildman. The implants remaining still presented certain difficulties but they were considering all their options, because Anika might have found a lot of maturity in the last few years but she was still a fiercely determined individual who didn’t acknowledge obstacles. Anika had made time for her long lost Aunt Sofia in her life, and her obsessive focus seemed to have settled on creating a settled, human, family life for herself as quickly as possible, in a headlong and somewhat worrying rush. 

Chakotay and Anika, Tom understood contextually from what Kathryn did and didn’t say, had also needed, jointly and separately, to get over Kathryn to a certain extent, in order to build a life together. A life that was not largely about the absence of a third party who was by choice and temperment not available to them in the ways they had once wished. It seemed like Chakotay and Anika had made some pretty successful steps in that direction, both in building and in rejecting, and Kate was obviously conflicted about all of it. Proud of Seven, happy for them, and grieving the losses that she undeniably felt but could barely even speak about. 

“It’s not like I wanted…” she said, a poor attempt at casual reassurance. Her voice was too thick and she breathed steady and tried again, “Sometimes I think we all got too wrapped up in each other on that ship. Too close, too dependent, too bitter. It’s good that we’re moving on. It let’s the air in.”

Tom kissed her forehead and pulled her closer again. “Not moving too much, I hope,” he said, meaning them, reminding her that he’d been just as much a part of that stew of overinvolvement. Privately he thought that the joint sense of emotional commitment on that ship out there in the dark is what kept them alive and somewhat sane on the way back, but it wasn’t the time to point that out. Not when Kathryn was smarting with the sting of feeling those bonds rearrange, and let go.

“You know,” said Kate, “I never really felt like you and I were completely, fully a part of all that. The Voyager situation.”

“Really? It’s not like we exactly knew each other before, in spite of the family stuff.”

“I knew of you, certainly. And I’m sure you knew of me, considering how I’d monopolized your father’s time.”

“Once I knew you, I didn’t hold it against you. Or, to be honest, I didn’t hold it against you for a long time before that.”

“Maybe it wasn't even the history. I can’t explain it. You were just. Different. The rules don’t stick with you, not in any direction. And when you look at me, it’s like you recognize me. You see someone in me that I think I’d like to be,” she said slowly, soft and almost shy in that way that would have seemed out of character to him before he knew her better. “I think maybe,” she said, “That’s why I’m here now, Tom. I think I wanted you to look at me and know who I am.”

“I know who you are, of course I do. I always will, I think. And I don’t care what brought you, or if you don’t know yourself, I’m just… so happy you’re here.”

Tom could see that Kathryn had come home and woken up to find herself in even more tenuous place than he had with the failure of his marriage. She had stuck to her principals and with what was right for the quadrant and she had found herself wounded seriously, and then found herself grounded by the admiralty in recompense, and her loyalty doubted. Then she had found that her mother was vulnerable to age and mortality just like the rest of the human race, and then realized, again, that she was not the favoured daughter -- in some senses of favoured, anyway. Then she had been forcibly reminded that she was single, unmarried despite previous and incomplete attempts otherwise, and childless, this by choice but now also increasing inevitability, and the woman who had been her special protege was or had stepped out of her grasp, not with anger but with firm finality. And top top it all off, she was facing the near certainty that she wouldn’t captain another ship, and to do anything but hold down a desk in San Francisco until she ran out her time with the Fleet, she would have to play a game she wanted no part of -- or leave altogether. 

All of their lives had been gravely shaken by the return, and many of them hadn’t found quite what they’d pictured when they got home. Kathryn had seemed to get on with life more quickly and effortlessly than many of them, but it had caught up with her now, severalfold. She’d been their loved, feared, and revered leader, the center of their universes and the top of their social structure, and now she was a solitary woman facing an uncertain sea. Tom wondered if she realized how much the sudden isolation was affecting her. He’d always known that she thrived on the attention as much as she hated it.

By the early summer twilight of barest morning, he’d heard it all and tried to absorb it. Kate had fallen asleep again, talked out and wrung out with emotion. He kept a hand on her waist, feeling her breathe. He didn’t want to stop touching her now that he could, was allowed. He tried to stop worrying long enough to regain sleep. He wondered how long Kate would stay. He wondered if, by telling him all of this, she had been agreeing to really let him help. He wondered what he could do that would help, besides offer himself, and try to remember only as much of the past as would give him hope, not doubt, and hold on.


End file.
